  Thumbs down from a Eurovision fan!, 2007-08-05
Well I have not read any books by this author before, but am a fan of the Eurovision Song Contest.
I was really excited by the set up of this book.What is it like to get zero points at the Eurovision Song Contest? One minute you win your national finals, then you come last.
This book has a fatal flaw, you want to hear the songs. You want to hear the song you are reading about in the book.
I wanted to know what happend AFTERWARDS to these singers. I felt there was far too much of the author telling you how hard he worked to track down the singers. He seemed to shoe-horn in "witty" jokes which just fell flat in my opinion.
Perhaps this would work better as a TV programme?
Expected more from moore, 2007-06-26
Having recently finished reading the excellent Spanish Steps by Tim Moore (possibly the funniest travel book I've ever read), I really wanted to like this too. Unfortunately it fell flat and I ended up struggling through to the end.
This is a crying shame because the premise is perfect; Moore meets with and interviews the acts from a song contest roundly sneered upon (at least from within these shores) who'd failed to collect a single point for their efforts. This comedic potential collapses however through a repetitive routine of tracking down said artist, interviewing them (and opening old wounds in the process), hearing what they have done since (in most cases, not much) before moving onto the next one. It lacks the wit and sparkle of his earlier efforts and ends up being, sadly, a tad boring.
Bring back the donkey Tim!
Congratulations! And celebrations!, 2008-12-27
The British may pretend to have no time for Eurovision but it's always the Brits, I notice, behind the books, theatre pieces and TV documentaries about Eurovision. Usually the combination of this annual Euro-pop jamboree and British hack ends with tired old Eurosceptic cliches about 'Johnny foreigner', 'political voting' and 'awful' music. To his credit Tim Moore resists playing to the gallery in this way and has properly researched his subject matter. I'm relieved he got to this idea first ahead of a lesser writer who would have served up a lame, half-baked and misinformed dog's dinner of a book. Moore's work would translate into an excellent TV documentary but given the clueless BBC's attitude to the Contest, don't hold your breath. Meanwhile, thanks to the wonders of Youtube I'm off to check out the hapless nul pointers myself.
A new side to Moore, 2007-09-21
As a long-standing fan of Tim Moore with a all-time loathing for the European Song Contest (ESC), I approached this book with trepidation. I needn't have done.
After a slow but necessary start (for those of us ESC neophytes) describing its history, Moore gets into his stride when he starts to visit and interview those luckless, and sometimes hapless performers who have have had the misfortune to score 'nul points' since 1978.
The range and depth of both the research and interviews are extraordinary, given the subject matter and the sympathetic ear he brings to all seems to be rewarded, with the single exception of a Nordic narcissist.
The final chapter about his first visit to the contest itself is a return to the knock-about humour of some of his earlier books.
Compassionate and insightful. A joy.
Strangely moving, 2010-07-19
In which Tim Moore tries to track down every one of the 14 acts who have failed to score a single point in the Eurovision Song Contest since the mid-1970s. He doesn't quite succeed - four aren't interested or are otherwise untraceable and one is dead - but what he finds along the way is often scary, often touching and often just plain weird.
As a nation, the UK - a large, mainly gay, following excepted - loved to scoff at the Eurovision for as long as I can remember but still tunes in nonetheless. Moore sometimes lapses into this, which is all too easily done, and he is a bit too pleased with himself at times, but he is also genuinely witty (this man write for the Torygraph??) and some of what he unearths is really insightful. In its way, this book tells you more about modern Europe than most academic tomes.
As we learn along the way, the scoring system by which national juries give 12 points to their favourite song down to 1 for the 10th favourite came in in the mid-70s. Prior to that, an arcane system meant that loads of songs scored zero, while for a few years it was impossible to do so. The scoring goes on almost as long as the songs these days, which means a long drawn-out torture at the bottom of the table while the winner usually emerges long before the end.
It is worth noting that 'nul points' is a misnomer. Nobody is scored zero, they just never get mentioned. And in correct French it would be a singular 'nul point' in any case. Moreover, getting nul points doesn't mean that your song was the worst one, merely that nobody thought it among the ten best. Most of the nul-pointers were no worse than many others around them.
Plenty of other songs have scored very low and been utterly forgotten, but the act of scoring zero guarantees you a place in history. How you deal with it varies. Some have embraced failure (the original nul-pointer, Norway's Jahn Teigen), some have just got on with their career (Iceland's Daniel), some have spent years running away from the humiliation (the deeply troubled Finn Kalvik, also from Norway) and some are clearly too batty to be affected by it in the first place (Portugal's Celia Lawson).
Sometimes, though, it is a serious business. Switzerland's Gunvar Guggisberg basically had her life ruined by the tabloid magazine Blick for no more than being an indiscreet twit with a bit of a past who then fouled up in the contest. The chapter on her all shows a very dark underbelly to Switzerland, which comes across as a throughly nasty and hypocritical society.
Likewise, even when Turkey finally won the contest and invited all the previous national representatives to the show, they could not stop harping on at poor Cetin Alp, who had nul-pointed nearly 15 years ago, live on national TV. The poor man died four days later, still only in his 50s. Probably a coincidence, but he deserves the dedication of this book to him all the same.
The last nul-pointers to date were our very own Jemini, an engagingly bouncy pair of Scousers who were far from talentless but who did mess up horribly in Riga in 2003. As Moore sagely points out, this was the culmination of our long-term half-in, half-out attitude to the whole thing - and maybe to Europe in general - for the scoring system based on phone votes makes it unlikely that anyone will score nul points again. Predictably, we both scoffed at the silly contest and jeered at them for letting us down.
A funny, moving book which takes a daft talent show and holds a mirror very neatly to Britain and Europe. Highly recommended.
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